When Pope John Paul II visited Damascus in May 2001, Bashar used his welcoming speech to denounce the Jews, saying, “They tried to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ and the same way they tried to betray and kill the Prophet Muhammad.”   read more

Officials “admitted to illegally disenfranchising and misleading voters” and to violations of “improperly rejecting eligible ballots and sending voters to the wrong precincts,”said ThinkProgress. They also failed to comply with voter requests for absentee ballots, provided wrong information to precincts about who was coming to vote and when, and failed to add to the rolls voters who registered in a timely manner. The names of 9,600 voters weren’t included on lists in polling places in 2012.   read more

The tax preparation firm H&R Block and Intuit, maker of TurboTax, have lobbied Congress to keep the Obama administration from simplifying the filing of taxes. In some cases, the IRS could offer automatic tax filing for some taxpayers, but H&R Block and Intuit’s lobbying are to blame for the changes not being developed and implemented. They have also convinced U.S. Senate members to needlessly expand the Earned Income Tax Credit form, an added incentive for taxpayers to seek their services.   read more

The meat was purchased from a variety of stores. The test results showed that all 458 pounds of the beef contained bacteria that indicated feces came into contact with the meat at some point. One kind of bacteria detected can cause blood or urinary tract infections. Nearly 20% of the test meat contained another bacteria that causes about 1 million cases of food poisoning each year. Only 1% contained Salmonella, which causes 1.2 million illnesses and 450 deaths in the U.S. annually.   read more

The possible victims could be Americans or non-Americans, as well as institutions, businesses, structures and locations. The directive, however, contains several examples of when U.S. intelligence agencies could skip notifying someone in the line of fire. For instance, if the notification “would unduly endanger U.S. government personnel, sources, methods, intelligence operations, or defense operations,” an agency could disregard the policy.   read more

“The reality that nearly 85% of detentions at Guantánamo stem from foreign partners with their own interests in round-ups ... rarely factors into the heated rhetoric from conservative politicians," said The Guardian. “There is great reason to disbelieve claims that detainees at Guantánamo are the ‘worst of the worst’, including the fact that many were sold to the U.S. for a bounty, not based on any real quality intelligence the U.S. had gathered,” said Laura Pitter of Human Rights Watch.   read more

Unwanted sexual contact is a common occurrence for many women—nearly 30% will experience it sometime during their lives, according to the CDC. That’s why legal experts say it is important for states to have laws on their books that address this problem. “Society can condemn this behavior through criminal law and say, ‘You pay a penalty for this.’ It may be a small penalty, but you pay a penalty,” said professor Erin Murphy.   read more

D.C. had an average of 82 hours of delay per commuter, followed by Los Angeles (80 hours), San Francisco (78 hours), New York (74 hours), and San Jose (67 hours). The study says “travel delays due to traffic congestion caused drivers to waste more than 3 billion gallons of fuel and kept travelers stuck in their cars for nearly 7 billion extra hours – 42 hours per rush-hour commuter. The total nationwide price tag: $160 billion, or $960 per commuter.”   read more

Despite government claims of safety, officials admit that one way nuclear material could be spread into the atmosphere is if a nuclear facility was hit by a fire. Now a report says that a federal nuclear agency has failed to upgrade aging fire suppression systems in its buildings. The NNSA claims it doesn’t have enough funding to replace aging water pipes intended to prevent or fight fires at nuclear weapons facilities.   read more

The Sierra Club says the Hunter power plant “is one of Utah’s worst polluters and a major source of dangerous smog-causing nitrogen oxide pollution, soot, and smog pollution.” Air quality modeling shows emissions from the plant are reportedly causing “significant exceedances of national clean air standards for dangerous sulfur dioxide pollution.” Pollution from Hunter and other sources has made the air in Utah’s several national parks barely suitable for breathing, according to the NPCA.   read more

Obama submitted “a complex draft resolution that authorizes the president to use force against the Islamic State,” said The Atlantic. Some Republicans in Congress, however, won’t touch the authorization—not because it could potentially draw the U.S. into a protracted conflict, but because it doesn’t go far enough. Obama’s request specifies that the use of U.S. ground troops is forbidden, and it puts a three-year limit on the authorization. Republicans would prefer something more open ended.   read more

Does using a government computer to access a website dedicated to helping people have extramarital affairs constitute grounds for punishment? The answer is probably not. “The rules of the game for morality in federal offices may be straightforward for pornography (it can get you fired) — but the kind of skeleton in the closet that showed up in the trove of 36 million users exposed on the cheating Web site presents officials with a murkier problem, experts say,” according to the Washington Post.   read more

Opponents of ballot selfies say they could lead to vote buying or voter intimidation. Legislators feared, for instance, that a selfie could be used as proof that a voter had cast his or her ballot a certain way to collect payment. The New Hampshire law said anyone showing photographs of their completed ballots to others or posting them online could be fined up to $1,000. The ACLU objected to the statute, claiming it violated free speech and the right of political expression.   read more

“The U.S. could likely reduce its number of school shootings, workplace shootings, and public mass shootings...if it reduced the number of guns in circulation,” said Lankford. “Until now, everyone was simply speculating about the relationship between firearms and public mass shootings. My study provides empirical evidence, based on my quantitative assessment of 171 countries, that a nation's civilian firearm ownership rate is the strongest predictor of its number of public mass shooters."   read more

Lockheed Martin operates Sandia National Laboratories, one of the nation’s leading nuclear research facilities. It has had this responsibility since 1993, yet Lockheed officials decided to use some of the federal contractor funding to lobby Congress from 2008 to 2012 to get a more lucrative deal. While it did not receive the kind of contract it hoped for, Lockheed Martin came away with a two year non-competitive extension worth $7.7 billion.   read more

Judge Gee said the detention of immigrant children violates the 1997 Flores legal settlement, which established legal requirements for housing children who are undocumented immigrants or who are seeking asylum in the U.S. She says the detention centers and temporary holding cells along the border are “deplorable” and don’t “meet even the minimal standard” for “safe and sanitary” conditions. She also stated that children may not be held in facilities not specifically licensed for housing minors.   read more

Fatalities from truck-involved crashes have been on the rise, climbing 17% from 2009 to 2013. During the same period, car-related deaths declined more than 3% thanks to “airbags...and anti-lock brakes,” Abramson wrote. “The trucking industry has resisted most of those safety devices.” The industry instead is trying to push Congress to loosen rules on trucking. That includes allowing truck drivers to work 82 hours a week and eliminating the weekly two-day rest break.   read more